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A fascinating article from Information Week titled “Kurzweil: Computers will enable people to live forever” sums up some of Ray Kurzweil’s more interesting predictions for the very near future. Being a dedicated fan of “hard” sci-fi (that is, the kind that develops plausible science that integrates seamlessly with the story itself) I’m always interested to see how some of our best futurists’ visions match up with various sci-fi authors’ visions. For instance, some of the sci-fi I read when I was a kid presented the future that we’re living in now. Just how close are we to those early visions of the near future? Well actually, not very. The problem was most of the predictions were made with inferior knowledge of the future, because they were made in the context of their time. Just take a look at an episode of the original Star Trek– you’ll understand what I mean. At the time it was cutting edge, but now we realize the big giant flaws (remember the analog countdown timer wheel on Sulu’s console?)

Thus you get stuff like the photo shown here (click to see larger image): The “home computer of the future”. I wonder - just what could that wheel possibly be for?

When I was younger, my initial reaction to articles predicting the future was usually something on the order of “Wow, what exciting times those will be! I can’t wait!” Ah, the innocence, the naiveté of youth. (How times have changed. The main difference, now that I’m no longer – cough, cough – young, is my thoughts are more like, “What can I invest in to take advantage of this?” But then again, if I could ever answer that question with any confidence, I would have “more money than Calvin Coolidge – put together!” **)Anyhoo –

Here’s just a few of the amazing things Ray Kurzweil is predicting for the near future (within 50 years):

• If you can make it another 15 to 30 years, you’ll probably be able to live forever
• Computational power will have multiplied by about a billion times within 25 years
• Computer intelligence will be about a billion times more powerful than human intelligence by 2045
• You can backup your memories by the late 2030s
• The common cold will be solved in the next 10 years.

If you’re really interested in see what the future may hold, you probably ought to check out this series of articles in New Scientist (scroll down past the top screen). About 80 people take a shot at predicting the future, and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. Besides Ray Kurzweil, there are others, like:

• Sydney Brenner – Nobel prize-winner for medicine
• John D. Barrow – Cosmologist
• Benoit Mandelbrot – Creator of the Mandelbrot Set
• Robert Ballard – Oceanographer
• Christof Koch – Cognitive and behavioral biologist
• Irene Pepperberg – Harvard University psychologist
• Simon Baron-Cohen – Cognitive neuroscientist
• Peter Noorvig – Google’s Director of Research
• …and many more (they asked me to contribute - I’m sure they did; but alas, I just moved, and my letter must have gotten lost in the mail.)

The article with Kurzweil ends with a sobering thought, though. One of the things we’ll have to make sure we do (“we” meaning “we as a society” that is) is to make sure we can “stay ahead of the game”. I mean, it may be all well and good to live forever, but what about the ramifications? Where would you put all the people? What would it do to our culture? How would it change religion? And etc., etc., etc.It’s kinda like some poor goober winning $10 million in a lottery, but without having the knowledge or skills needed to handle that kind of money (and believe me, it takes some!), he ends up wasting it all. It’s sadly true that sudden vast riches can literally cause more harm than good for those unprepared for it. (Still, most of us, like Tevya from Fiddler on the Roof, can’t help but wonder: “Would it spoil some vast eternal plan/if I were a wealthy man?”)

Anyway, check out the articles if you want. But don’t be surprised if reality turns out to be more – or less – than predicted.

** Lena Lamont’s hilarious line from the 1954 classic movie, “Singin’ in the Rain”, starring Gene Kelly, Doris Day and Donald O’Connor. For those of you who’ve never seen it, I highly recommend you stop what you’re doing, go rent a copy, make some popcorn, and see it with your friends. It’s well worth it.

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